Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have any interest and don't have a company (perhaps you don't even know what that's), for those who have e-mail, you've experienced the uglier side. You have probably seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with a lot of addresses?
You may be sure of just one thing: in the event the price is not expensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They may be equal to some listing of street addresses taken from your phone book.
There's no phone book for email addresses, so where do these cheapo lists come from? Mainly, the addresses are picked from web logs, pupil or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, and other places where folks gather to innocently swap information. They don't know their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. They did not ask to be added to a mass email list. And they certainly didn't ask to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Picking email addresses is legal. But it's widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. Nevertheless, you can damage your company, perhaps irreparably. The possible outcomes for breaking the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain.